Digital cameras have a certain weak point under artificial lighting conditions. Lighting which is working under AC electrical system is flickering at two times higher frequency than the electricity frequency is. There are two dominant electric frequency systems in the world: 50 Hz and 60 Hz. Electricity has both negative and positive half of a sinusoidal wave. When such electric signal is used for lighting, light automatically rectifies the signal and the output light has a frequency of 2×50 Hz=100 Hz (e.g., in Europe) or 2×60 Hz=120 Hz (e.g., in the United States). The flicker can be modelled, e.g., using functions of cos2 or abs(cos).
FIG. 1 shows frequency comparison between electricity and light: base electric frequency ‘f’, and light frequency ‘2f’. Frequency ‘f’ is either 50 or 60 Hz. If arbitrary exposure time is used, a digital camera image may have horizontal stripes, which are caused by light flickering. Specifically, due to 100 or 120 Hz light flickering, digital camera sensors based on a CMOS rolling shutter are showing flickering as horizontal striping on images. With sensors that have a global shutter, the flicker is apparent as the intensity of the image varies from frame to frame.
One way to avoid flicker appearance is to match an exposure time to 100 or 120 Hz frequency. In this case the exposure time can be kept at N×( 1/100) second or at N×( 1/120) seconds, N=1, 2, 3, etc. There are certain limitations when using this method. When the illumination level is increasing, an image brightness level can increase to such a level that the image gets saturated. Because of that at some point the exposure time will need to be shortened to less than 1/120 seconds or 1/100 seconds time where the flickering starts to appear. FIG. 2 shows the 50 Hz case, wherein the flickering is unavoidable when the exposure time is less than 1/100 seconds.
Depending on digital camera setup, a limit for a flicker appearance is achieved at a certain operational point. There are many parameters that affect a flicker sensitivity, e.g. sensor sensitivity, sensor dynamic range, gain control, lens aperture size and lens luminous intensity.